Some thoughts on ornaments II
Last month I shared some ideas about a general approach to playing ornaments and how to practice towards playing them well and comfortably. This month I will share more such thoughts and also discuss specific named ornaments. Next month I will write about the concept of “authenticity” and ways of introducing students to that concept.
Freedom in performance
Ornamentation is related to the idea of freedom in performance. There is a continuum of freedom in making music. At one end of that continuum is out-and-out improvisation—not that all improvisation is totally “free” in the sense of “unstructured” or with no rules. But if a player is improvising, then that player is essentially responsible for deciding what the notes will be, and also for the judgments about how to play those notes. Conceptually, as a matter of accuracy or authenticity, the player is not responsible to another musician—that is, a composer—or to any concept of fidelity to someone else’s ideas. When a player undertakes to learn an already written piece, that player accepts some level of responsibility to reproduce what the composer of that piece created in the first place. Of course, there are many different philosophical and practical approaches to this issue; but ornamentation occupies a place somewhere in between improvisation and simply “playing what the composer wrote.” Exactly where this place is can be hard to define, or, perhaps more accurately, cannot be defined because it is not just one place. But to some extent, ornaments are written as signs rather than just as notes because they are defined as intrinsically freer than the notes around them.
This freedom is of two different kinds; remembering both of them can be very helpful to students. The first is the freedom to add or subtract ornaments. To me, one of the most telling pieces of evidence for the existence of this freedom is that copyists—in the era when most music was copied by hand—felt free to add, remove or change ornaments. That is, clearly the philosophy of copying was that the “notes” should be copied exactly (of course, mistakes were made), but that “ornaments” could be treated with considerable discretion. There are surviving manuscripts of many pieces that differ greatly from one another in ornamentation. If they differed as much in the “real” notes, we would not consider them to be the same piece. Some of Bach’s students, and others in his circle, added copious ornaments to their copies of various of his pieces: the Inventions, for example, or the Canzona, BWV 588. Bach himself added a fair number of ornaments to his personal copy of the (already published) Goldberg Variations. This latter fact reminds us that we can’t even be sure that what we have of the composer’s own account of the ornaments in a piece always represents what that composer really—or finally—wanted.
François Couperin wrote that he considered it crucial that performers play exactly the ornaments that he wrote, neither adding any nor omitting any, and play them exactly the way he said that they were to be played. This suggests that—if we care by and large about respecting the wishes of composers—we should play all of, and only, Couperin’s own ornaments. However, his vehemence on this point—what seems to amount to his actual anger at performers for their approach to ornamentation in his music—also tells us that this was not the common practice at the time. (It is also true that even Couperin’s rather long and detailed ornament tables do not by any means resolve all of the questions about how exactly to play his ornaments. In fact, his “real note” explanations of his ornament signs are largely written in small notes with no time value to them, and therefore give little or no information about the timing or rhythm of the ornaments. More about this below.)
After 1800
One more confirmation of the notion that ornamentation—that is, ornament sign-based elaboration of written musical lines—is essentially defined by the performer’s freedom is this: over a period of time centered in the early nineteenth century, composers began to assume for themselves greater responsibility for determining all of the details of how their music should be played. This manifested itself in metronome markings, explicit phrasing and articulation marks, dynamic markings, more varied, explicit and expressive tempo markings, and, in organ music in particular, registrations. This was part of a long trend away from a performer/improviser-based musical culture towards a composer-based one. The fact that at this same time the use of ornament signs declined significantly—not totally, of course, but enough that we tend to think of ornamentation as being more essentially a part of Baroque music than of later music—suggests that those ornament signs were seen as leaving freedom—too much freedom—in the hands of performers. Thus we believe or assume that we should not, for the most part, add ornaments to music written after about 1800, or take away those that are there.
Ornament tables
Typical Baroque-era ornament tables (and there are quite a few that survive) are paradoxically a main source of confirmation for the second aspect of freedom in playing ornaments—that is, the freedom to play a given ornament in a number of different ways. This is because those ornament tables never give a complete, cut and dried, or even necessarily technically meaningful account of how to play an ornament, beyond the most basic. They give, for the most part, a bare account of what the notes of the ornament should be, sometimes with hints about the placement of the notes of the ornament with respect to the beat, sometimes not. They do not really address the rhythm or timing of ornaments. These tables serve as a guide to the most basic shape of ornaments for players who do not already know that shape, and they are now—and were when they were written—very valuable for that purpose. However, any practical attempt to use them to figure out the subtleties of playing any ornament simply doesn’t work. This suggests to me that it was understood and accepted that those subtleties would be figured out on a flexible basis by each performer as the occasion arose.
Now I would like to turn to some specific ornaments, with an emphasis on trills, offering a hodgepodge of musical/artistic thoughts and practical ones.
Trill
The trill is by far the most complicated ornament to understand and, especially, to execute comfortably. It is widely understood that trills are ornaments involving the printed note and the note above it. (It is possible that I have never had a student come to me who didn’t already know this—certainly almost never. It is always worth checking, though, to be sure that a student does understand this.) The big question, at least at the beginning of the process of learning any particular trill, is which note comes first, and the usual assumption is that in Baroque music trills should begin on the upper note, and in music later than the Baroque period, they should begin on the main note. There is absolutely no reason not to believe that this is basically true, and plenty of reason to believe that it is. I have to put this in a kind of half-fudging way for a reason, though: there are all sorts of exceptions, uncertainties, and ambiguities. One major exception is that by and large Italian Baroque trills probably were meant to begin with the main (printed) note. (In fact it is fairly likely that the reason that classical period and later trills begin on the main note is that in the mid to late eighteenth century, Italian style, especially as represented by Italian opera, spread widely throughout Europe and some of the conventions of that style with respect to ornamentation were adopted.) Another exception is that some North German Baroque composers who were influenced by Italian style probably also meant for many of their trills to begin on the main note.
Concerning this question, what I usually suggest to students is that they start by trying out a trill with the template suggested by the consensus about what was probably meant historically, and then feel free to change it if they find it unconvincing. If anyone finds him- or herself changing many or most trills away from what the composer(s) probably intended, that may suggest an esthetic bias, and it might be fruitful to try to challenge that bias. (For example, I—with my strong personal orientation towards playing Baroque music—have found myself wanting to play trills in Reger beginning with the upper note. I could try to justify this by pointing out that Reger himself had a strong orientation towards Baroque music. In fact, his music has more trills and other ornaments in it than other music from his historical period. However, it is actually quite unlikely indeed that he meant his trills to be played from the upper note. In fact, during his lifetime it was not even customary to play Baroque trills that way. The bias towards doing so in the music of Reger is mine, not his.)
Sometimes an intuitive desire to play a trill a certain way is related to articulation. For example, if a trill is approached from above, with the note immediately before the trill being the same as the upper note of the trill itself, then beginning the trill on that upper note will create an articulation, at least a subtle one. If the passage is one that the student wants to play with a strong, essentially overlapping, legato, then this articulation might seem jarring. Appropriate fingering (see last month’s column) and a light touch can be used to make the articulation as subtle and “musical” as possible. If a choice about articulation seems to force an interpretation of a trill that is inauthentic, then that might suggest rethinking that choice about articulation. However, this is always at the player’s discretion.
One interesting feature of trills is that, almost always, one of the notes of the trill is consonant and the other note dissonant against the prevailing harmony or against the notes of one or more other voices. It is interesting to notice which note stands in which relation to the harmony, and to observe the effect on a passage of starting the trill on the dissonant or the consonant note. Especially when starting on the dissonant note, it is interesting to try holding that note for different lengths before segueing into the rest of the trill, and listening for the effect of various lengths and overall trill shapes on the rhetoric of the passage.
In practicing trills, it often makes sense to start with a very even, “stilted” version of the trill. That is, once a basic decision has been made about the note shape of the trill, create a version of that shape which is rhythmically even, and not any faster than can be played easily. This may be eighth notes, or sixteenths, or sometimes thirty-seconds. Practice the trill that way at first. This will get the fingers accustomed to the correct note pattern. (In general, it is any hesitation or uncertainty about notes or fingering patterns that makes it impossible to play anything quickly and lightly, ornament or otherwise.) Then, as the passage itself gets up to speed, in many cases the trill will automatically become fast enough to “sound like a trill.” In some cases, the planned notes of the trill will have to speed up beyond the natural speeding up of the piece as a whole. At this stage, it is important to remember the feeling derived from the trill exercise that I described last month, and to recapture that feeling as the trill pattern speeds up and becomes a trill as such. The purpose of doing that exercise is to make that particular feeling of lightness, quickness, and floating—rather than descending into the keys—available to be recaptured at this stage in practicing a trill. The process of making a trill sound like a trill, while also allowing it to be comfortable and reliable, could be described as a coming together of the simple note-pattern of the trill and the feeling and technique learned through that exercise.
In general, students often attempt to play trills too fast, and in particular to start them too fast. The practice of holding the first note of a trill a little bit—dwelling on it—before proceeding to the next note and to the body of the trill is very useful for keeping trills relaxed and in the end allowing them to be faster and more incisive than they could otherwise be. I believe that often a student is unconsciously so worried, before actually starting to play a trill, that it won’t be fast enough, that he or she tries to get away from the first note almost before that note has been played. This only leads to tension. If the effect of dwelling a bit on the first note does not sound right as a final way of playing a given trill (and it often does sound right: I tend to do it myself on most trills, though to varying extents), then it can be abandoned later on, when the trill is comfortable and secure. At the stage of moving away from dwelling on the first note, if that is the choice, then it is extremely important not to let tension creep back in. The finger playing the first note should in a sense feel like it is relaxing into that note even if the second note of the trill is going to happen very soon indeed.
Appoggiatura
The appoggiatura is another ornament that raises issues of dissonance and consonance. Most often, the appoggiatura itself is the dissonant note. In deciding how long to make an appoggiatura—anything from a quick almost fleeting “grace note” to a note that occupies almost all of the allotted time—this dissonance is the most important thing to listen to. The more significant this dissonance seems, the more sense it usually makes to hear the appoggiatura/main note sequence as having a diminuendo effect. To achieve this, first, hold the appoggiatura just the right length, as determined by trial and error and careful listening, then make the motion from that note to the main note utterly legato, and finally, release the main note very gently if it is to be released before playing whatever is next.
Mordent
A mordent—the printed note, the note below it, and the printed note again—is perhaps the ornament that least disturbs the main note’s rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic identity. It is usually an “ornamental” ornament, that is, an ornament that does not increase the amount of harmonic motion—creation and release of tension—in the music. A player can experiment with different speeds in mordents. Often, perhaps paradoxically, a very fast mordent, assuming that it is played lightly and gracefully, sounds quieter than a slower one, and actually fits better with even a languid or cantabile melody. A mordent contains a hidden “almost repeated” note. Sometimes it is a good idea to change fingers, as if with a real repeated note. A fingering such as (rh) 1-2-3 or 4-2-3 or (lh) 1-3-2 or 3-4-2 will sometimes give more lightness and control.
Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by email at <[email protected]>.
